Solar Program

We’ve reached a nexus whenever we can “empower” our students to learn from the environment around them. Our solar system installations are fine examples of this, especially when our students/staff/community can visit an open (non-editable) website, see what their home school’s solar arrays are producing in real time, and have curricula available to support the data. Users may utilize the following list of links for every site in which solar photovoltaic arrays were installed:Adams Elementary

Once on the site, users can refer to the handy diagram below to help them navigate the webpage (energy production “Minisite”). It may take a minute for the data to load, even when toggling to and from different timespans, but once the data is viewable, users can run several different reports and save to an Excel spreadsheet. To run a production report from the Minisite, just choose the view you'd like to see across the top (e.g. 'MONTH'), choose a start date on the calendar at the bottom (e.g. '8/1/2014') and click the arrow* to the right to download an Excel document. Column data for Production Meter (Energy measured directly from the panels) and Inverters (Energy measured after the conversion from DC to AC power) will be relatively the same. The Site Performance Estimate column shows the estimated output of the system based on a five year average of weather readings that occurred on the same day those previous five years. These data points may be much higher or lower than the other columns depending on how cloudy the sky was that particular day.

Educational Resources

Please use these helpful links to get the highest educational value out of our new solar photovoltaic array system(s):

Curricula:Developed by Borrego Solar Systems, Inc. (our solar contractor) for primary, intermediate and secondary schools, as well as links to primary and intermediate curricula from other sources. In addition, a single in-depth solar production website was made for one of our schools (Pomona Elementary), to be used by all of our schools, to obtain other general information that can be used by teachers in their curriculum development. Please click this PowerLobby Kiosk View and allow a few minutes to fully load.

Power (kW) versus Energy (kWh): A great website for understanding Power (kW - the rate at which energy is used) versus Energy (kWh - the amount of power used over a period of time). There are many sites out there that define power and energy, so please feel free to use others. This is the site that Borrego recommended.